Andrea M. Herrmann

Choosing and Successfully Sustaining Competitive Strategies in the
European Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

It is a central claim of the national competitiveness literature that firms
exploit the comparative advantages of their environment by choosing to
pursue the product market strategy that is facilitated by national
financial- and labour-market institutions. Otherwise, so goes the argument,
firms are punished in that strategies receiving no institutional support are
less successful and therefore not sustainable in the long run. My analyses
of pharmaceutical firms in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom challenge
these arguments on the choice and success of competitive strategies. Given
that different measures of strategy success do not indicate that the latter
is in line with national institutional advantages, I develop an alternative
explanation for the strategy choices of firms. On the basis of my
qualitative interviews with managers, I argue that technological
opportunities to transform inventions or imitations into marketable products
are a primary concern when entrepreneurs choose their firm's strategy.